The old saying “what goes around comes around” has relevance to the influx of thousands of children from Central America to our borders.

These minors, some just infants, are creating a huge humanitarian crisis in border states like Texas, Arizona and New Mexico and in the process refueling the debate on illegal immigration.

As many as 60,000 undocumented minors will enter the United States this year; that’s up from about 6,500 minors in 2011. The surge of young people is overwhelming the Border Patrol. The agency has not been able to adequately house, feed and clothe the new arrivals. President Barack Obama has asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to deal with the influx, setting up new shelters and transferring many of the minors to locations as far away as Massachusetts.

By law these minors have certain temporary rights to a hearing and in many cases will be deported. Others, however, will be able to stay in the United States if they can prove they have been abused and abandoned.

While some of these minors are making the long trek from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala because they have heard rumors the United States is softening its stance on accepting undocumented minors, most of the young people tell stories about being forced to join the violent gangs that populate the cities and country-sides of Central America. They describe threats to their lives if they don’t join the gangs and the chilling prospect that if they do join, they will likely be killed in some sort of mindless turf war. El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala now lead the world in per capita murders.

Now back to “what goes around comes around.”

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration fought a leftist government in Nicaragua and leftist rebels in El Salvador. The administration pumped hundreds of millions of dollars to assist the so-called contra rebels in their fight against the leftwing Sandinista government in Nicaragua and to prop up the repressive rightwing military in El Salvador. Many of those who were recruited by the United States to fight these wars got their training in Honduras and Guatemala.

Once the wars ended and the United States got out the business of fighting the leftists, thousands of Salvadorans immigrated to the United States, especially to Los Angeles. Many of the Salvadorans quickly established street gangs, the most infamous being the Mara Salvatrucha, commonly known as MS-13. This gang spread its violence throughout California, adding new members from Honduras and Guatemala. The gang-related killing became so bad that in 1996 Congress passed the Illegal Immigrant Reform Responsibility Act, which made it easier and quicker to deport these gangsters back to Central America.

Once home, MS-13 became so powerful that today there are more gang members in El Salvador and Honduras than police.

Page 2 of 2 - And so the violence that marked the U.S.-funded wars in Central America came back to the United States in the form of MS-13 gangbangers. The worst of the worst members of MS-13 were sent home in order to make the streets of Los Angeles safe from constant killing. To finish this circle of violence, the United States is now seeing a new generation of Central American minors cross the Rio Grande River to escape the gang violence caused by those bad guys who we deported.

In short, we got rid of hundreds of Central American gangsters in our country only to have thousands of children come here to escape the gangsters; all this because we funded anti-Marxist wars in the 1980s and then opened our doors to violent criminals from those wars.

Now this circle of violence gets lost in the immigration debate as these Central American minors are seen as another reason to stop reform efforts and beef up security along our borders. But it’s important to remember that this exodus of young people from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala did not happen by chance. Foreign policy and deportation decisions made years ago brought on this crisis.

Michael Kryzanek is Executive Director of the Minnock Center for International Engagement at Bridgewater State University. He can be reached on Twitter@MikeKryzanek.